CHAPTER 7: Assimilate or Shut Up!: Lessons I Learned about Isolation as a Non-Traditional Graduate Student

I was born more than 50 years ago in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I come from a mostly Polish-Russian family. The men and women in my neighborhood worked as steel workers¸ postmen, truck drivers, bartenders, assembly line workers, receptionists, waitresses, office workers, gardeners, and they served throughout the military branches. Early geo-demographic research called us a solid blue-collar union manufacturing town, a designation that no longer exists in the field (Weiss, 1988). I stayed in Pittsburgh until it became a rustbelt city in the early 1980s. Shortly after a failed attempt at the University of Pittsburgh, I moved to San Francisco, and after years of community college night school, I finally matriculated to San Francisco State University in 2006 to finish my bachelor’s degree in cinema studies. With the exception of my time attending a PhD program beginning in 2012, I have lived in San Francisco since initially moving there.